My Grandma’s Home

 

The Whole

It is smaller than my boss’ office in Toronto, smaller than the place I refused to buy along the Lakeshore.  The walls are white, the paint chipping, revealing the dry wall and metal struts beneath.  The floorboards can be restored to be trendy but right now, you must wear slippers to avoid splinters.  The decorations are sparse, only meant to bring red-and-gold luck to the inhabitants.  Interior decorating does not exist here.  She has a corner unit and can look out her windows to two different views, one of lush subtropical hills and the other, the metropolis. The windows are always opened and bugs fly in even at this height.  I woke at 4:00 AM to the wild desperate calls of the birds and screaming monkeys from the forests which cover 80% of Hong Kong.  From my grandma’s window, I can see straight into the foothill cemetery where my grandfather and my uncle were put to rest.  On the other side of the building, I can see the gardens were my grandma goes for her daily walks and exercises.  She used to walk through the foothills everyday but now her knees are weak.  At times, the mist is so thick you cannot see anything.  Foreigners tend to mistake the fog for smog but the truth is Hong Kong manufacturing had taken flight to China much to the pain of the locals.  The moisture in the air is wonderful for my skin; when I came back from Hong Kong last year, my boyfriend reported that I was glowing.  My skin which was rough and patchy due to the Canadian weather and the manufacturing environment I had worked in had become baby-soft and clear in the matter of two weeks.  There is no laundry in my Grandmother’s apartment, everything is washed by hand and hung to dry on lines outside her window.  Clothespins line her window sill.

 

The Living Room

At first glance, there are minimal signs of individuality, only signs of family.   She has no singular chaises, only long wooden benches meant to the maximum amount of people closely packed together.  My grandma created cushions for the benches from 70’s teeny-bopper fabrics that my aunts and my mother had leftover after making dresses and leisure suits for themselves when they were young.  One bench has orange and teal walrus coverings, the other tiny pictures of young men and women strolling in bellbottoms.  There is no dining table, only a multipurpose Majong table for eating or for the guests to play on.  I used to do homework on this table when I was in Kindergarten.  My father picked an especially hard word for my Chinese name hoping that the increased difficulty would improve my manual dexterity and my patience and I remember crying at this very spot, struggling over the over 40 strokes of my name.  My father didn’t want a repeat of that with my brother and gave him a less industrious 31 strokes, but he regretted it later when my brother didn’t finish university, same degree.  There are new thick western-styled drapes which replaced the linen drapes she used to have, gifts from her children as opposed to gifts from her husband.  The only images are the pictures from the family shrine which sits on a cabinet on top of a television cabinet and from the adjacent self which holds Catholic iconography, Confucianism mixed with Catholicism.  The Gods of Fortune peek out from another self along with the Fortune Cats.  She has a poem on one wall:

    Amidst the boom of a bustling city,

    In tall towers and mansions we reside.

    Ask e what scenery most attracts me;

    A home with a small stream by its side.

 

The Kitchen

The kitchen space is 4 feet by 9 feet, the doorway so narrow that my brother had to go in sideways in order to go in.  Everything is adjusted to her height; I feel like I’m working in a space for midgets, every workstation is too low.  I hit my head on the exhaust of her gas powered stove.  There is no oven, only the most modern and most well equipped kitchens have these.  Steaming is the alternative and my grandma makes wonderful steamed meals.  The kitchen fridge is the size of what Canadians consider a mini-fridge but it once housed enough food to feed seven children, a factory worker and his wife.  It was considered a luxury along with the rice cooker.  Nowadays, it holds only oranges. She leaves the bananas out to ripen.  If you look into her cupboards, you will see the evidence of a large family – 16 rice bowls and accompanying chopsticks.  It is not unusual in North America to have more but she is a frugal woman and this is the exact population of her immediate family residing in Hong Kong. There is a small collection of clothe grocery bags in one corner – Hong Kong banned the use of plastic grocery bags a year ago. Tiny packages of traditional Chinese sweets recall her peasant past where every last scrap of edible food is not wasted: preserved mandarin peels, roots, and seeds lightly sugared to become desserts.  My Grandma has a sweet tooth.

 

The Washroom

Narrow and small; another room my brother can barely squeeze into.  The bathroom is a study in living small; the green movement out of immediate necessity, not promp and circumstance.  The sink has no mixer valve, hot and cold water comes out as separate entities on either end of the sink.  Two mirrors hang above it, one at my height – possibly for her husband and children to use-, the other at hers. The toilet is low-flo; just enough water to flush the waste away.  The bathtub is tiny and can only seat even my 5’2 frame with my knees to my chest.  You must start up the water boiler yourself before you bathe, flicking the ignition several times until you see flames in a little window.  It is a waste to have water heated all the time. 

 

 

The Bedroom

The bedroom fits a double sized bed and a wardrobe with about a foot of space in between; that is all.  Scraps of left over fabric from her children are in a pile.  There are some photo albums of her lost son, my uncle.  A picture of Jesus hangs over a covered mirror; a mirror in front of a bed is bad Feng Shui.  There is a hanging puzzle of a man with a dogsled team riding in the snow.  I remember this puzzle from before we immigrated to Canada.  Perhaps she imagined us going there. If you look at the door, you will notice tiny little holes from years of stapling good luck sayings before she started using tape.